Last year we only stopped in St Louis for a short rest after a month of intense photography of Kansas City Fountains. This year we dropped off our truck and trailer for a month while we took Amtrak out to Seattle, Washington on our Great Train Adventure.
I have mentioned several times now that our oldest is deeply into rock climbing so I tagged along on a session with friend at the local Upper Limits Climbing Gym which is about as close as I want to come. As you can see they have multiple walls festooned with holds they have to color code to tell which to follow. Thanks I'd rather be in a kayak or visit the Missouri Botanical Garden which we did a couple of times.
After completing our Great Train Adventure we spent a couple weeks in St Louis mostly just resting. Wandering along the waterfront is a view of the Coast Guard dredge by the Martin Luther King Bridge. The Mississippi is muddy and slowing all that mud behind a dam means a lot of the mud settles. Trying to keep an open shipping channel is a full time job. Visiting our oldest the dove continues to nest in the front porch planter and I am always fascinated by these huge fungi growing in the yard.
We had drifted through St Louis several times with no real reason to stop other than an aunt in the suburbs. After a lot of long hard work our oldest completed all the schooling and found someone in St Louis who needed an extra PHD. Having purchased a few houses in the past we headed over to offer a few pointers from the school of hard knocks and some opinions probably worth exactly what we got paid for them.
Assuming a lot of time in St Louis was in our future we started exploring Forest Park which was founded in 1876 and the site of the 1904 World's Fair with over 20 million visitors leaving behind facilities still in use today like the Missouri History Museum which is free except for special a exhibits like these railroad models actually operated by steam.
Another major attraction is the free St Louis Zoo which is still in it's original World's Fair location in Forest Park. We also visited the Missouri Botanical Garden just down the street on the north edge of Tower Grove Park both legacies from Henry Shaw in the 1800s. Obviously I will have a lot more about St Louis in later years and our visit to the Missouri Mississippi confluence is covered on the Missouri page.